Guy's Gaze Tells You What's Really On His Mind

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How a man's gaze roams over a woman's body can tell you how into
sex he is — a new finding that doesn't play out when the genders
are swapped.

Men's gaze reflects their underlying sexual motivation, the
researchers found. A woman's gaze, on the other hand, does not
seem to match her sexual thoughts as clearly.

The findings aren't just about the differences between Mars and
Venus; researchers hope they can be used to track the sexual
motivations of sex
offenders, providing a way to measure how well treatments are
working.

"Eye movement is spontaneous and very difficult to inhibit so we
thought perhaps we can use an eye tracker as a reliable marker to
track sexual interest," study researcher Kun Guo, a psychologist
at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, told
LiveScience.

The eyes have it

Previous work has found that men, especially, give away their
sexual thoughts with their eyes. The dilation of the pupil in
response to sexual images, for example, can
reveal sexual orientation reliably in men and in gay women,
though straight women don't show such clear patterns. Studies
have also found that heterosexual men gaze longer at pictures of
women than of men, while heterosexual women look at male and
female images about equally. [ 50 Sultry
Facts About Sex ]

Guo and his colleagues had previously discovered when young men
look at images of women close to them in age, their eyes are
drawn to the chest and waist-hip region. (This may not shock any
woman who's been ogled in a bar lately.) These two regions are
likely important signals for men, with breasts hinting at the
sexual maturity of the woman and waist/hip ratio suggesting her
ability to carry a child, Guo said. Men don't show the same
ogling patterns when looking at older women or children,
suggesting this sizing-up may be a signal of sexual interest.

To test the idea, the researchers showed 30 men, ages 18 to 25,
and an equivalent group of women, all heterosexual, pictures of
clothed children, early-20s adults and adults in their late 30s
or early 40s. They asked the participants to simply look at the
pictures as they'd normally scan an image while a gaze-tracking
device recorded where their eyes moved.

Next, the participants filled out questionnaires about their
sexual personalities, covering topics from how sexually inhibited
they were to how sexually compulsive, or likely to take sexual
risks, they were.

Sexual gaze

By comparing the questionnaire answers with the gaze-tracking
data, the researchers found that men who reported more sexual
compulsivity or risk-taking
gazed longer than other men at the breasts and hip-waist regions
of 20-year-old women — but not at those regions in girls or women
older than themselves. In other words, their gaze seems to give
away their higher-than-average sexual interest. And the longer
gazes are confined to women they find sexually interesting (based
on age).

Women's gaze patterns were not nearly so neat. The researchers
did find that highly sexually compulsive women looked more at the
bodies of the 20-year-old women than did other women, but they
also looked more at the bodies of children and 40-year-old women.
It could be that the more sexually compulsive a woman is, the
more she
compares her body with other women's, the researchers wrote
online Nov. 13 in the Journal of Sex Research. Either way, the
women's gaze did not appear to reveal their sexual interests; no
gaze patterns were found when shown images of men.

Guo and his colleagues are now analyzing the data from a third
experiment comparing the gaze patterns of sex offenders with
non-offenders. So far, he said, the results look promising.

"We argue probably we can use this eye tracker potentially as
some kind of reliable methodologically to asses how effective the
treatment is and how likely people will be to reoffend," Guo
said.